Psalm 18

For my weekly quiet time this Sabbath, I will blog about Psalm 18 and its interpreters. Psalm 18 is similar to II Samuel 22, and, to see my post about that, click here. There are religious interpreters who have argued that Psalm 18 is a conscious alteration of II Samuel 22 for the religious community, as David's perils were made into a Psalm that could be spoken by all the people of Israel. But, as I read the two Psalms (II Samuel 22 and Psalm 18) side-by-side, I really didn't see any significance in their differences. They seemed to me to be just variants of the same Psalm, expressing the same concepts in slightly different ways. But I'm open to other ideas.

Here are three items:

1. Even evangelical sources acknowledge that there is overlap between Psalm 18 and ancient Near Eastern motifs. In my study of Psalm 18, I saw that in John Walton's Intervarsity Press Bible Background Commentary, and in Peter Craigie's Word Biblical Commentary on Psalms 1-50. Other ancient Near Eastern cultures present a god coming in thunder (vv 17-19), or rescuing a distressed person from death, which is described as waters (v 16). Psalm 18:10 talks about God riding on the cherubim, and, although Psalm 18 does not describe these cherubim, Ezekiel 1 does, referring to them in terms of animals, namely, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. We see this sort of thing in an Assyrian relief, which depicts an armed storm god on the back of a creature that has a lion's body, a bull's head, and eagle's wings. I've read some religious commentators who have searched for deep theological significance in the descriptions of the biblical cherubim. But maybe the biblical authors were simply imitating their neighbors, and their neighbors were portraying the heavenly servants as composite creatures because that was strange, and they believed that there was something about the divine realm that was frightening and out of this world.

So was the Bible a rip-off of the ancient Near East? C.S. Lewis makes an interesting point on pages 82-83 of Reflections on the Psalms, after describing the thunderous epiphany of God in Psalm 18:

"All of this is of course in one way very close to Paganism. Thor and Zeus also spoke in the thunder; Hermes or Iris was the messenger of the gods. But the difference, though subtle, is momentous, between hearing in the thunder the voice of God or the voice of a god. As we have seen, even in the creation-myths, gods have beginnings. Most of them have fathers and mothers; often we know their birth-places. There is no question of self-existence or the timeless. Being is imposed upon them, by preceding causes. They are, like us, creatures or products; though they are luckier than we in being stronger, more beautiful, and exempt from death. They are, like us, actors in the cosmic drama, not its authors. Plato fully understood this. His God creates the gods and preserves them from death by His own power; they have no inherent immortality. In other words, the difference between believing in gods and in many gods is not one of arithmetic. As someone has said 'gods' is not really the plural of God; God has no plural. Thus when you hear in the thunder the voice of a god, you are stopping short, for the voice of a god is not really a voice from beyond the world, from the uncreated. By taking the god's voice away---or envisaging the god as an angel, a servant of that Other---you go further. The thunder becomes not less divine but more. By emptying Nature of divinity---or, let us say, of divinities---you will fill her with Deity, for she is now the bearer of messages. There is a sense in which Nature-worship silences her---as if a child or a savage were so impressed with the postman's uniform that he omitted to take in the letters."

Scholars of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East may find Lewis' points debatable, holding that the Hebrew Bible's depiction of the divine realm overlaps with the ancient Near East much more than Lewis may believe. But Lewis does make a profound point: that when one views creation as the product of one God, then nature becomes a profound repository of messages from that one God, rather than merely a battleground of different deities. (This topic will come up again in my study of Psalm 19.) How this plays out specifically, that's tough to say. A thunderstorm can communicate to us that God is a source of water and (thus) food, even as it demonstrates that God has a dangerous side---one that the wicked should not test! But what happens when a severe thunderstorm causes havoc and destruction for people who are not particularly bad, but are just trying to live their own lives? What does that communicate about God?

2. I encountered some debate about the date of Psalm 18. W.E. Addis, on page 367 of Peake's Commentary on the Bible (which is old, since it dates to the early 1900's), disputes Davidic authorship of the Psalm:

"The internal evidence is decisive not for but against the Davidic authorship. There is a want of concrete detail, so that even the advocates of Davidic origin differ about the period of David's history to which the Ps. belongs. The conventional theophany would suit any victory won by a champion of Judah in later times. How could David have written 'Thou savest a poor (or humble) people'? or described himself in the language of Pharisaic piety, as one 'who kept the ways of Yahweh...for all his judgments are before me and I did not put his statutes from me'? Such language presupposes familiarity with the Pentateuch, or at least with a notable part of it. The monotheism of the Ps. is in keeping with that of the Psalter throughout: it is absolute and dogmatic, 'Who is God save Yahweh?' Very different were the views of the real David, who kept idols called teraphim...in his house (1 S. 19:13, 16) and assumed that when his enemies drove him forth from Yahweh's land he would have to worship other gods (1 S. 26:19). Nor could David (who died long before the Second Isaiah) have realized the missionary vocation to Israel and said, 'Therefore will I give thanks to thee among the nations and sing unto thy name.'"

Addis dates many of the Psalms to the Second Temple Period, which was after Israel's exile. And, while conservatives who read the above quote may criticize Addis because of his liberal assumptions (i.e., David could not have known about the Pentateuch, which indicates that Moses did not write the Pentateuch before the time of David, and also that Psalm 18 is from a mere mortal with limited knowledge, rather than a piece that was inspired by an omniscient God), Addis does make a powerful point: that Psalm 18 appears to manifest a piety that is different from that of David in I Samuel.

And yet, in my opinion, Addis should have elaborated on his claim that Psalm 18 could relate to "any victory won by a champion of Judah in later times." Addis, like many interpreters, appears to acknowledge that Psalm 18 is relevant to Israel's battles with her enemies, which is not surprising, for vv 37-40 talk about battle. The theophany that Psalm 18 describes is similar to ancient Near Eastern descriptions of divine assistance in battles. Peter Craigie says that the Psalm may have been used to celebrate victories after campaigns. And the Nelson Study Bible makes an interesting interpretive move. V 41 says that the enemies cry out to the LORD, and the LORD does not answer them. According to Nelson, this is saying that the foreign enemies of Israel---who do not even worship Yahweh---are calling upon Yahweh because they are losing their battle against the Israelites.

Could this fit the Second Temple Period? At many times during the Second Temple Period, the Jews did not fight that much, for they submitted to their Gentile oppressors. Could Psalm 18 have been composed in reference to the Maccabees, since they did fight battles? The problem is that Psalm 18:50 says that God gives to David and to his seed great victories---and the Davidic line was not ruling in the Second Temple Period, but it did rule Judah in the pre-exilic period. Is the Psalm Messianic, an expression of hope during Israel's post-exilic period that God would restore the Davidic king and help him to defeat Israel's Gentile enemies? Psalm 18 doesn't mention restoration of the Davidic dynasty---just the king. I can envision post-exilic Jews making use of Psalm 18 to assure themselves of God's power against evil-doers, but I can't see the Psalm being created in that period.

What's interesting, however, is that Psalm 18 looms large in minimalist Thomas Thompson's Mythic Past. Thompson views much of the Hebrew Bible as a product of the Hellenistic Period. For him, Psalm 18 is about David as a cosmic Messiah, and I am unsure what precisely Thompson means by that. On page 54, Thompson states that Psalm 18 is used to interpret the entire David story, presenting him as "the representative of the righteous in a cosmic struggle of Yahweh against the nations and against God's enemies." This seems to imply that the David we read about in I-II Samuel was the cosmic Messiah. On page 324, though, he says that the cosmic Messiah "rules from a heavenly Jerusalem and judges the world." In Psalm 110, Thompson states, "this messianic son of Yahweh is described as the 'lord' and 'patron' of the singer, a heavenly David, whom Yahweh gives birth to as life-giving dew from the womb of the dawn."

What exactly is Thompson proposing? That Psalms 18 and 110 believe that there is a heavenly David and an earthly David (see here for a rabbinic belief in a heavenly and an earthly Jacob), or that a heavenly Messianic David overtook the earthly David, the way that some Christians in antiquity thought that "Christ" came upon the human Jesus and went back to heaven at Jesus' crucifixion? Or that David thought that, in a sense, he ruled the world, since his God was the ruler of the world? One more point that Thompson makes is that Psalm 18 functioned for the individual Jew, assuring him that God would move heaven and earth to deliver him from his enemies, even if he wasn't a descendant of David. There is a sense in which every individual Jew has cosmic influence, in this scenario.

3. I listened to an excellent sermon last night by Gary Demar (see here for the sermon). Gary Demar appears to be a partial preterist---one who believes that many of the prophecies of the Bible have been fulfilled in history, but that Jesus will still come back in the future to judge humanity. Elements of his partial preterism include the view that the events of Matthew 24---even the coming of the Son of Man---were fulfilled at the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Demar is also a post-millennialist, which means that he thinks Christians should evangelize the world and create a godly society before Christ's return.

I already knew this stuff about partial preterism before I listened to Demar's sermon. And, to be honest, I was disillusioned with partial preterism. I felt that it was a weak Christian attempt to explain away Jesus' failure to return quickly, as he promised he would. I thought that the second coming of Christ in Matthew 24ff. had to be about more than the destruction of Jerusalem, for Jesus' second coming also includes a celebration among the saints as well as God's judgment of the nations (not just Israel), and those things did not happen in history. I also disliked what I believed to be an anti-Jewish element in partial preterism---not that it's against the Jewish people, but rather that it is against Judaism as a religion, as well as contains supersessionist tendencies. One preterist I know remarked that Judaism was destroyed after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., marking the beginning of a new era. I found that claim to be ludicrous, for some of Judaism's most fruitful years occurred after the destruction of Jerusalem! That's when we got the literature of rabbinic Judaism! Moreover, I have problems accepting that the "end" or the "last days" that the New Testament talks about refers to the end of the Old Covenant---which doesn't strike me as all that cataclysmic.

So why did I enjoy Gary Demar's sermon? I am a fan of the fourth century Antiochian method of interpreting the Hebrew Bible---which interprets prophecies in the Hebrew Bible in light of events in Israel's history, rather than viewing them solely as prophecies about Jesus. I have liked that sort of approach ever since I listened to a tape by Jews for Judaism (a counter-missionary organization) that talked about non-Christological, Jewish ways to interpret passages that Christians have applied to Jesus---such as Isaiah 7:14 and Isaiah 53.

Well, Gary Demar had this Antiochian sort of approach in his sermon---only he didn't relate prophecies to the time of the Maccabees, as Antiochians tended to do. First of all, he looked at Psalm 18, which, in the superscription, is applied to God's deliverance of David from his enemies, and also from Saul. Psalm 18 mentions earth-shattering, cataclysmic events, which we do not see in the life of David. Consequently, Demar concludes that those events are symbolic of God's deliverance of David from his enemies. Secondly, Demar asks why prophecies that predict earth-shattering, cataclysmic events cannot likewise be symbolic---as Psalm 18 was for the events in David's life. Demar's conclusion is that Zechariah 12---in which God dramatically saves Jerusalem and Judah from her enemies---concerns God's rescue of the Jewish people during the time of Esther. And, as someone who likes to look at context rather than forcing the Hebrew Bible into a christological mold, I appreciated something Demar said about the people beholding the one they had pierced in Zechariah 12. While many Christians have related that to Jesus, Demar said that it was about God himself, who was wounded by the sins of his people. According to Demar, John Calvin had such an interpretation as well. Demar may have supersessionist tendencies in his own belief system, but, here, he relates prophecies in the Hebrew Bible to the history of Israel, and God's faithfulness to the Jewish people.

I also appreciated Demar's humble, low-key approach. I once listened to a series on prophecy by someone who believed in the pre-tribulational rapture, and this guy claimed that some of his views were "Holy Spirit inspired." But Demar did not do that. He just looked at the Bible, and offered his viewpoint on it.